“The problem isn’t just aging equipment, the problem is the set up at this facility,” said one former air traffic controller familiar with the region. “Commercial telecommunications lines were never built for mission critical data like this, including radar data.”
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Documents obtained by CNN, in addition to interviews with air traffic controllers, show that rank-and-file union members opposed moving operations to Philadelphia from Newark, which had been plagued by staffing shortages for decades.
“They’ve (FAA) tried many things over the last 30 years to try to improve the staffing and none of them had actually worked," said David Grizzle, who had been head of the FAA’s Air Traffic Organization during the Obama administration.
The move originated within the ATO with the thought that moving air traffic controllers to a city with a lower cost of living than the New York City area would make it easier to hire air traffic controllers, and the FAA signed off on the plan during the first Trump administration with an expected completion date in early 2022.
"In September 2020, the Trump FAA justified its plan, arguing that 'despite efforts' the agency was still struggling to hire air traffic controllers and that controller levels are 'projected to decline,' according to a separate FAA internal document obtained by CNN," the network reported. "Less than a month before the 2020 election, on October 5, 2020, the FAA in collaboration with NATCA drew up initial engineering plans for the move to Philadelphia, according to the documents."
The air traffic controllers union and the FAA reached a memorandum of understanding about two weeks after president Joe Biden was inaugurated to move control of Newark's airspace to Philadelphia, but a former FAA official said most of the planning for that would have been completed long before that agreement was signed.
“They go through the process and almost brainstorm the bad things that would happen and what can be done to mitigate that,” the former FAA official said. “You don’t sign a memorandum of understanding and then begin studying something.”
However, rank-and-file union members opposed the move, according to multiple air traffic controllers.
“It was a terrible idea, people on the ground knew it was bad,” said one recently retired controller.
The FAA solicited volunteers to move to Philadelphia in February 2021, and kept asking through mid-2022, but there weren't many takers, and the agency started mandating moves in January 2023.
"One month before the FAA moved control of Newark’s airspace from New York to Philadelphia, the air traffic controllers’ union raised serious safety concerns about the feasibility of the plan," CNN reported. "According to internal union PowerPoint documents dated June 2024, that were reviewed by CNN, the union argued that moving controllers to Philadelphia would only make things worse by increasing 'coordination times resulting in delays and jeopardizing safety.'
The plan went live in July 2024, and the FAA's remote feed connected by telecommunications lines was plagued with issues from the start, and communications failed entirely on April 28 when a copper wire burned inside one of those telecom lines.
“Politicizing this only muddies the extent of the problem and the decadeslong challenges the FAA has had with air traffic controller staffing issues and antiquated air traffic control equipment,” said Peter Goelz , a CNN aviation analyst and former managing director of the National Transportation Safety Board.
